As many readers of this blog will have received a Kindle for Christmas I thought I should share my list of the free ebooks that I recommend stocking up on.

UPDATE [12 Jan 2012]: Now translated into Catalan by Alvaro Martinez.

UPDATE [20 Jan 2012]: Dan Gillmor’s We The Media added to make a round 20. 

Online journalism and community management

Starting with more general books, Mark Briggs‘s book Journalism 2.0 (PDF) is now 4 years old but still provides a good overview of online journalism to have by your side. Mindy McAdams‘s 42-page Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency (PDF) adds some more on that front, and The Society of Professional Journalists‘s Digital Media Handbook Part 1 (PDF) and Part 2 provide a pot-pourri of extra bits and pieces including computer assisted reporting (CAR).

For more on CAR, the first edition of Philip Meyer‘s classic The New Precision Journalism is also available in full online, although you’ll have to download each chapter in Word format and email it to your Kindle for conversion. It’s worth it: 20 years on his advice is still excellent.

On community management, Jono Bacon‘s The Art of Community (PDF), comes in at over 360 pages. It’s a thorough exploration – told largely through his own experiences – of an area that too few journalists understand. A useful complement to this is Yochai Benkler‘s landmark book on how networked individuals operate, The Wealth of Networks, which is available to download in full or part online from his page at Harvard University’s Berkman Center. And each chapter of Dan Gillmor’s We The Media is available in PDF format on O’Reilly’s site.

Staying savvy in the information war 

If you’re reporting on health issues – or ever expect to deal with a press release from a health company – Testing Treatments (PDF) is well worth a read, providing an insight into how medicines and treatments are tested, and popular misconceptions to avoid. It’s littered with examples from reporting on health in the media, and well written. And if you need persuading why you should care, read this post (all of it) by Dr Petra Boynton on what happens when journalists fail to scrutinise press releases from health companies. It’s also free to download, so what’s your excuse?

And also on the subject of keeping your wits about you, Dan Gillmor‘s latest book on media literacy, Mediactive, is published under a Creative Commons licence as a PDF,

Culture, copyright and code

Lawrence Lessig has written quite a few books about law and how it relates to the media when content becomes digitised, as well as code more generally. Most of his work is available online for free download, including The Future of Ideas (PDF), Code 2.0 (PDF), Remix, and Free Culture.

Matt Mason‘s book on how media culture is changed by “pirates” gives you a choice: you can download The Pirate’s Dilemma for whatever price you choose to pay, including nothing.

Investigative Journalism

Mark Lee Hunter has written 2 great free ebooks which strip away the mystique that surrounds investigative journalism and persuades so many journalists that it’s something ‘other people do’.

The first, Story-Based Inquiry (PDF), is an extremely useful guide to organising and focusing an investigation, demonstrating that investigative journalism is more about being systematic than about meeting strangers in underground car parks.

The second, The Global Casebook (PDF), is brilliant: a collection of investigative journalism – but with added commentary by each journalist explaining their methods and techniques. Where Story-Based Inquiry provides an over-arching framework; The Global Casebook demonstrates how different approaches can work for different stories and contexts.

For more tips on investigative journalism the Investigative Journalism Manual (you’ll have to download each chapter separately) provides guidance from an African perspective which still applies whatever country you practise journalism.

And if you’re particularly interested in corruption you may also want to download Paul Radu‘s 50-page ebook Follow The Money: A Digital Guide for Tracking Corruption (PDF).

Related subjects: design, programming

That’s 17 18 books but if you want to explore design or programming there are dozens more out there. In particular, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist is a HTML ebook, but the Kindle deals with HTML pages too. Also in HTML is Digital Foundations: Introduction to Media Design (h/t Jon Hickman).

Have I missed anything?

Those are just the books that spring to mind or that I’ve previously bookmarked. Are there others I’ve missed?

UPDATE: Some commenters have suggested I should point out that these are mostly PDFs, which some people don’t like. Personally I find them fine to read on a standard Kindle if you change the orientation to landscape. Christian Payne recommends the free tool calibre for converting PDFs into the more Kindle-friendly .mobi and other formats.

Yesterday I chaired a panel on ‘UGC and Social Media’ at Birmingham’s Hello Culture event. Determined that it did not descend into the all-too-common obsession with tools that often characterises such discussions, I framed it from the start with the questions “Why should we care? Why should users care?”

The panellists were grateful – and the tactic seemed to work. We talked about the tension between creating content and building relationships; between the urge to ‘get people on our platform’ and going to their platforms instead. We discussed how the experience of designing physical spaces might inform how we approach designing digital ones; and about revisiting strategic priorities as a whole instead of simply trying to ‘find time’ to ‘do the online stuff’.

In other words we talked about people rather than technology, and strategies rather than tools.

So this morning it was good to be brought back down to earth and reminded just how embedded the technology-driven mindset is by Richard Millington.

Richard writes about a ‘State of Branded Online Communities’ report that uses Bravo TV as an example of a “successful” online community. The problem is that by any sensible measure, it isn’t. And I think Richard’s quotes on just how flawed the example is are worth reproducing here at length:

“If simply posting a standardized thread each week and leaving people to their own endeavours is seen as good community management practice, what exactly is bad community management? This is community management by autopilot.

“… You judge a community’s success by it’s stage in the life cycle, the number of interactions it generates, it’s members sense of community and the ROI it offers the organization. ComBlu defines success by what features the platform offers. By that assessment, nearly all of the most successful communities would be considered failures. [They struggle to get more than 10 members participating in a community at any one time.]

“ComBlu credits Bravo with an array of successes which have no impact on the community’s success. Only one suggestion is offered:

“[..] On our Bravo wish list? A better gamification or reputation management system.”

“There are a variety of things the community needs, a better gamification system certainly isn’t one of them.

“How about hiring a community manager to take responsibility for stimulating discussions [...]?

“… Content sites branded as communities are still content sites.”

Ah, gamification: I’ll tip that to be next year’s QR code/Facebook page. How about an iPhone app? Everyone else is doing it so why shouldn’t we? Remember when everyone had to have a space in Second Life?

It’s a point I’ve made before in Technology is not a strategy: it’s a tool (and its follow-up), and which is explored at length in my Online Journalism book. Too often in an organisation or in a student project someone decides that they must launch a Facebook page or ‘be on Twitter’.

I recently compared this to someone approaching a TV producer, saying they wanted to make a documentary, and explaining that their strategy would be to “use a camera”.

No producer would accept that, and we need an equally critical attitude to the use of new technology. Otherwise we’re just hammers walking around seeing nails.

I’ve been meaning to blog for a while now about 2 excellent books I’ve read this year about communities online, both of which are pretty much essential reading for anyone involved in community management.

The first is Andrew Lih’s book The Wikipedia Revolution. Lih is for me the world’s leading academic on Wikipedia, not least because he’s been a participant in Wikipedia himself and has a great understanding of how the community works from the inside.

The book charts how the community has evolved from one that was maintained by personal connections to a whole stratified society of rules, roles, technologies and norms.

Particularly key are the sections on the development of the ‘Spanish Fork‘ (the mere mention of a commercial version of Wikipedia led to members of their Spanish site effectively leaving in protest and setting up their own encyclopedia) and Chapter 5: The Piranha Effect, which I gave to my MA Online Journalism students as one of their first readings.

The book also deals with trolls, vandalism (the Siegenthaler incident) and censorship.

The second great book is from experienced community manager Angela Connor: 18 Rules of Community Engagement (also available as an e-book). This is a great complement to Lih’s as this comes from a very different, practical, angle drawing not just on her own knowledge but those of readers of her blog. In fact, it’s a very bloggy book generally.

Connor emphasises the need to invest lots of time in any community developing relationships, making connections and fostering relationships. She looks at the importance of content (of the right type) and questions, of rules and culture, egos and compliments, influence and complaints.

It’s a breezy book that doesn’t impose one solution on every problem but frequently returns to the fact that every community is different, and so even common problems like trolls and spamming will have different solutions. That said, there are plenty of experiences offered.

These are probably the best 2 books I’ve read on online communities – but if you’ve read something good in the area, please let me know.

After the first two of my interviews with news organisations’ community editors , Reed Business Information’s Andrew Rogers blogged his own ’3 lessons‘ he’s learned from his time as Head of User Content Development. Reproduced by kind permission, here it is in full:

1. A community is only really a community if it builds (or builds on) genuine relationships between the members.

Otherwise it is merely interactivity. A corollary of this is that an online community needs to be focused around a common interest, need or passion (or simply “something in common”)

2. The most important tool for dealing with problems is your Terms of Use / Ts&Cs.

If you are to deal effectively with problems of misbehaviour you need to be able to point to the rule which says the user can’t do that.

You will still be accused of suppressing free speech/being a Nazi of course, but at least you can justify your actions in removing posts, banning users etc.

Spend a lot of time on developing the rules and lay them out in simple language

3. Find ways to reward the best or most prolific contributors

This might be through a reputation system, increased rights, or simply highlighting their contributions in some way.

Many users are driven to upload their photographs to the Farmers Weekly website in the hope that they will make it into the magazine.

It’s also true, of course, that one should aim to reward all contributors by ensuring that someone pays attention to them.